PrimeJunta

IMO the base AoE is too big for almost all AoE spells. I can fit most enemies within the base radius fireball already, for example, and the priest AoE buffs/debuffs are ridiculously large. I say shrink 'em and make the INT bonus bigger.

I'd rather add more abilities with durations and AoE. Barbs for example rely a lot on Frenzy and Defiant Resolve. Those are powerful and duration-limited, and INT already makes a tangible difference. Plus Carnage of course. Knockdown duration is a big deal for fighter effectiveness, and hobble duration makes a lot of difference for rogues as well. I say keep the effects as is and add more of those. I'm also not super-thrilled with the idea of making more than one attribute affect the same combat stat. It makes the system more confusing and blurs the differences between abilities.

IMO making the AoE effect of INT more pronounced and combining it with making the area controllable from base radius to radius with INT bonus would sort this out nicely. High-INT wizards would get significantly more control over their spells, low-INT ones would be restricted to base radius. It's a tangible benefit but not so much it would make INT a must-have stat for AoE spellcasters.

I for one am delighted that there are enemies that will kill you dead right quick if you don't take the right precautions, hard counters or no.

@tirnanogh AFAIK it's currently not (quite) playable on Wine, so I would hold off in any case.

The problem with that line of thinking is that it damns the majority of the game as unnecessary. Only if the majority of the fights are unnecessary.

Nope, makes INT too valuable. Also random failures are not fun. How many of you tried playing an armored arcane caster in the NWN's, with a non-zero chance for spell fizzle? I did. Took off the armor and went cheerfully to the back row again.

No, ranged fighters aren't currently supported. You'd be gimping yourself. A ranged cipher who refuses to use cipher abilities would actually work out better. This would be easy to remedy, and I hope they will.

You can create a full party in BG2. Just start in multiplayer mode.

Think of it this way: getting into an unnecessary fight is a strategic mistake. Such things should come with a price tag.

But the Petrify mechanic isn't. If you're already poisoned and losing, say, 4 Stamina / 1 Health per second, it'll convert it to 4 Health / second. That's the functional equivalent of 16 Stamina / second. That's scary.

...I present, spiders. There's a special kind of spider that inflicts the Petrify status effect. Petrified characters take damage directly from Health, rather than Stamina. If it so happened that he was just bit by another spider which Poisoned him... wowza. Terrifying. There are spell counters to defend against this, as well as tactics of course. I thought this was bugged but it's actually intentional. The problem in the beta right now is the usual, lack of feedback -- the only way to tell your character's been Petrified is if you see it zip by in the combat log. This is IMO the functional equivalent of 'zap you're dead' with the tiiiiny concession that if you catch it just in time and hit pause, there might be something you can do. There is a spell there somewhere that's kind of a Sanctuary equivalent, and others which temporarily suppress negative status effects. But it's still terrifying. I don't think y'all will miss death effects and hard counters when this shapes up.

IMO it's good that there are genuinely low-maintenance classes in the game. More potential variety. It would be quite different to play a party with, say, three fighters and three wizards or priests. It becomes more a game of positioning -- place the fighters to control the battlefield and leave them there, then use your casters to destroy the enemy (and keep the fighters standing). The fighters themselves might be boring, but having them could lead to interesting tactical twists.

I think I've been to that wedding. Never played Skyrim though.

Yep, heavy ranged weapons are currently OP relative to anything else (other than magic). I don't care for the OP's proposed solution though; adding more mechanics or applying different adjustment rates to different attacks would only complicate things further, whereas this is IMO relatively easily addressed by simple tuning of base damage, accuracy, and recovery time values plus tweaks to enemy AI so it targets squishies more aggressively. A morale system would be nice, even a rudimentary one, but it should manifest as morale breaking and enemies running away rather than bonuses/penalties to combat stats. (It worked well in many of the IE games.) The trouble with those kinds of adjustments is that they're hard to make properly transparent; you'll just see your character continuously missing without a clear indication why. As it is it's difficult enough to tell what's going on and why your character isn't doing any damage.

@Hamenaglar and others -- gave one a very brief spin today. It did not work very well. Perhaps I'm missing something though. Trouble is that the first-level accuracy buff is a rehash of that one DnD spell that gives you +20 to hit for your next attack. I.e. it's ridiculously short-duration. To make gish tactics viable I'd need a longer-duration, possibly less dramatic accuracy self-buff to make up for the abysmal base accuracy wizards have. Now everything else works as adverised except that instead of the expected burst of magically-enhanced sword-slinging it's whack whack (accuracy buff runs out) whiff whiff whiff whiff whiff whiff whiff (arcane veil runs out). I added a post to the General Builds Thread that a gishy accuracy self-buff would be nice. Hope some of the devs read it.

Just FYI, sex is central to the biggest questline in the Backer Beta.

Talking about combat XP? I'm fairly certain he and others have flatly stated that it's ruled out. Unless that changes, I can see why he wouldn't feel like stating it again (i.e., because it would immediately dump a truckload of distilled Internet hate on him). Bit of "Generalissimo Franco is still dead" IMO. "Combat XP still not on the table." (Yeah, there was that one video where it looked like he was leaving the door open, true, but I think you guys are grasping at straws here. Invite Ziets and have a good Irish wake, then move on. It wouldn't be an IE successor if there wasn't something about it that drove you up the wall, no?)

What about... Grimoire?

Yah, I've noticed the atmosphere becomes noticeably more cheerful every time Josh shows up and actually explains his thinking and goals. So more info would be nice. A blog post addressing these topics maybe?

Concerning gish builds. The way I see this would work is (1) wizard self-buffs into short-duration melee monster, (2) wizard charges into melee, makes mayhem, (3) buffs run out and wizard self-extracts back to the second row. Now, the wizard has a rather nice selection of self-buffs which could be used for this purpose. There are various spells which increase defenses and even deal damage to attackers, there are spells for fast movement or even (at L4) short-range teleport which could be used to get out when the buffs run out. However, there appears to be one piece missing from this puzzle though. Accuracy. There is a level 1 spell which dramatically increases accuracy, but it is so short-duration that it is effectively a single-attack spell only, or almost; even the Arcane Veil stays up a good deal longer. It is not really useful for this tactic, so the upshot is that the wizard rushes into combat, whiffs madly for a while, then rushes back. It would be nice to have a selection of longer-duration accuracy self-buffs to make this type of tactic more viable. I don't think it would be unbalacing as it would require step-by-step hands-on attention and the damage would be a burst rather than sustained.

They slow down your attacks. Heavy armor doubles the attack time, and heavy weapons are much slower than light ones. So if you've got a fast guy fighting a slow guy, and the fast guy hits at half-second intervals while the slow guy hits at two-second intervals, the fast guy will get four opportunities to interrupt the slow guy for every opportunity the slow guy has to interrupt the fast guy. If even one of those interrupts goes through, the slow guy has to start his attack again. If the fast guy has high PER and the slow guy low RES, he's effectively stunlocked. The converse is not true. If both have the same Concentration, but the slow guy's Interrupt is twice as good as the fast guy's, the fast guy still has the advantage: twice as many of his Interrupts will fail, but he's still interrupting twice as often because he attacks four times faster. This is why interrupts are most effective against casters--a cast is effectively an attack that takes six seconds to make. Lots of opportunities to interrupt that.

Haha cool! Developers are gamers too! Lots of familiar comments there... and at least the pro-combat-XP camp now has a champion worthy of carrying the banner. There's only one part where my experience is drastically different: the AoE spells. I've found them vastly powerful. I've used the cone, ball, line, and wall-shaped ones extensively, and they make winning battles easy. Also controlling the battlefield to the extent that you can place them effectively isn't as hard as he says, even with the sorry state the combat is currently in.

I'm still reserving judgment on this one. It does make a difference even in melee, mostly if you're at the receiving end (slow weapons, heavy armor), but also if you're doing the interrupting (fast weapons, light armor). It is not a very efficient way of hampering melee opponents though, AFAICT, and will only really make a difference when dealing with casters (slow action, big impact). As it is IMO RES is much more useful than PER, because even low-PER characters can interrupt strategically with special abilities (Thrust of the Tattered Veils... that sounds pretty Freudian by the way. Haven't used it though, so don't know if the casting time is fast enough). Put another way, a frontline caster needs high RES or he won't be able to cast, ergo, Interrupt matters. IMO the main problem with the mechanic right now is the virtually nonexistent feedback. If there was an associated bark and e.g. the portrait/selection circle flashed yellow when you got interrupted or interrupted someone, it'd be much easier to get a sense of what it really means. It might be better to remove Interrupt from regular combat and make it affect spellcasting only, and then add special abilities/spells you can use tactically (low-damage, high-Interrupt per-encounter attacks). It'd be even more important to put something genuinely valuable on PER then though. However I'd prefer they added good feedback first, to get a better idea of what it really means. Not sure if increasing the interrupt time would be a good idea; doubling it to a second would make melee more like wrestling where everybody's stunlocked a lot of the time. I think.

I think we're dealing with a psychological effect here at least partly. It just feels "wrong" that dumped stats still give bonuses, even if they're small. I have a feeling that if you set the zero point to 10 and applied the adjustments as negatives below and positives above, a lot of people would be happier even if it ended up in the same place. (I do think the abilities ought to have more impact in absolute terms as well; I don't really feel I'm missing much from my dump stats or gaining much by pumping them. I would like it to sting if I dumped something to 3 so I'd have to adjust my tactics accordingly.)